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BENEATH THE SURFACE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Source: Esquire

For more than fifty years, he’s traveled deep into the heart of @Ken Gargett and America. But with his new Netflix special—a film of his intense, powerful one-man show on Broadway—Bruce Springsteen reveals that his bravest journey has been wrestling with his own mental health.

The first time I meet Bruce Springsteen is backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where he is in the homestretch of performing his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway. It is a few weeks before I am supposed to sit with him for an interview, but his publicist has asked me to come by before this performance so he can, I deduce, check me out. I arrive at 7:00 and am directed to a small couch near the backstage bathroom. Finally, five minutes before curtain, I see, coming down the stairs that lead to his dressing room, a pair of black work boots and black-legged jeans. Springsteen ducks his head beneath a low arch and walks toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m Bruce.” We shake hands, and then there is silence. He looks at me and I look at him, not sure what to say. At five-foot-ten, he’s taller than you think he’ll be; somehow, he remains the runty-scrawny kid in the leather jacket, possibly dwarfed in our minds due to the years he spent leaning against Clarence Clemons.

That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I find it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netflix as a film. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right.

"DNA.”

This is, curiously, the first word that Springsteen says when he takes the stage. An unlikely, unromantic, unpoetic choice for a man who has always been more about the sensory than science. Yet in many ways, DNA is Springsteen’s unrelenting antagonist, the costar that he battles against. This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire—will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am?

A few minutes later, in the show, he talks about the moment that opened his eyes to what was possible if one believed in the power of self-creation. It’s a Sunday night in 1956, and an almost seven-year-old Springsteen is sitting in front of the TV with his mother, Adele, in the living room of the tiny four-room house in Freehold, New Jersey, that he shares with his parents and sister. This is the night he sees Elvis Presley. In that moment, when he receives that vision, he realizes that there is another way, that he can create an identity apart from “the lifeless, sucking black hole” that is his childhood.

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says when he unpacks the lesson Elvis taught him, “was to risk being your true self.” 

Yeah. . .,” Springsteen says when I sit down with him a couple weeks later and tell him it seems the essential question of his show is “Are we bound by what courses through our veins?” He looks off to his left into his dressing-room mirror, the surface of which is checkerboarded with photographs, much as a mirror in a teenage boy’s bedroom might be. Among the many images: John Lennon in his NEW YORK CITY T-shirt. A young Paul McCartney. Patti Smith. Johnny Cash. They are, as Springsteen tells me later, “the ancestors.” It’s into this mirror and toward these talismans that Springsteen often gazes when he is answering my questions. He’s a deep listener and acts with intent. He has a calm nature and possesses a low, soft voice. He has a tendency to be self-deprecating, preemptively labeling certain thoughts “corny.” He smiles easily and likes to sip ginger ale. Sometimes before telling you something personal, he lets out a short, nervous laugh. Above all, he speaks with the unveiledness of a man who has spent more than three decades undergoing analysis—and credits it with saving his life.

His cramped dressing room looks more like the “office” the superintendent of your prewar apartment building carves out for himself in the basement, next to the boiler. Much of it feels scavenged. There’s a brown leather couch and a beat-up coffee table. Nailed up above the couch is a faded, forty-eight-star American flag and a ragged strand of white Christmas-tree lights. Now Springsteen sits on the couch before me, dressed in black jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt that reveals a faint scar at the base of his neck—the scar that remains from a few years ago, when surgeons cut him open to repair deterioration on some cervical discs in his neck that had been causing numbness on the left side of his body. On his right ring finger is a gold ring in the shape of a horseshoe. 

Finally, he speaks.

“DNA is a big part of what the show is about: turning yourself into a free agent. Or, as much as you can, into an adult, for lack of a better word. It’s a coming-of-age story, and I want to show how this—one’s coming of age—has to be earned. It’s not given to anyone. It takes a certain single-minded purpose. It takes self-awareness, a desire to go there. And a willingness to confront all the very fearsome and dangerous elements of your life—your past, your history—that you need to confront to become as much of a free agent as you can. This is what the show is about...It’s me reciting my ‘Song of Myself.’ ”

But as you learn after spending time with him, there is what is on the surface and then there is what is below. Because the show is also about other tensions: solitude versus love (the ability to give it as well as receive it); the psychological versus the spiritual; the death force versus the life force; and, most of all, the father versus the son. Yes, it is about his struggle to find his true self, his identity. But most of all, it is about his father—and Springsteen’s search to find peace with the man who created him but, in many ways, almost destroyed him. Here’s Springsteen describing in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, how he saw himself as a young boy, and how his father perceived him:

Weirdo sissy-boy. Outcast. Alienated. Alienating. Shy. Soft-hearted dreamer. A forever-doubting mind. The playground loneliness . . . “[I had] a gentleness, a timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I wore on the outside and the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled [my father]. It made him angry.”

He tells me his father made him ashamed that he was not hard like him but more like his mother. “My mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others’ feelings. She trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit. That was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you off on a lifelong quest to sort through that.”

Doug Springsteen was a stout man Springsteen remembers as “two hundred and thirty pounds of nickels in Sears slacks” and, at one point, as having the “face of Satan.” He worked a range of blue-collar jobs, from floor boy in a rug mill to bus driver, yet his primary occupation was not outside the house but inside; he dominated the family home, ruling his small kingdom with silence and menace. His throne was a chair at the kitchen table. Night after night, he’d sit in the darkness, drinking and brooding. “It was,” Springsteen writes, “the silent, dormant volcano of the old man’s nightly kitchen vigil, the stillness covering a red misting rage. All of this sat on top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn’t begun to contemplate it.”

Springsteen jamming at age 20.

When I ask Springsteen about his childhood, he tells me, “There was the house—and then there was what was happening in the kitchen. And when you went into the kitchen, the force of what was going on there was intimidating. But you had to deal with it. So the kitchen became freighted with meaning and danger. It was a dark, quiet place. The air was thick. So thick. Like swimming through dark molasses. You had to make your way through and make your way out—without disturbing, or creating too much attention toward yourself.”

I tell him I find it interesting that he smashed that silence with rock ’n’ roll. A joyful noise.

“When I was a child, and into my teens,” he says, “I felt like a very, very empty vessel. And it wasn’t until I began to fill it up with music that I began to feel my own personal power and my impact on my friends and the small world that I was in. I began to get some sense of myself. But it came out of a place of real emptiness.” He pauses. “I made music for that kitchen. Go to Nebraska and listen to it. But I also made music for my mother’s part of the house, which was quite joyful and bright.” He locks his eyes on me. “You have to put together a person from all the stuff that you’ve been handed.”

It was his father’s distance and silence that Springsteen rebelled against, yet his father’s identity is what he embraced. Because when Springsteen decided to adopt a rock ’n’ roll identity, what did he do? He stole his father’s work clothes and his persona—if Doug Springsteen wouldn’t love his true son, maybe at least he’d love a reflection of his son as himself.

One of the rawest stretches of the show comes when he sings “My Father’s House,” from his sixth album, Nebraska. After, he speaks of still, forever, being a boy who yearns for his father’s love: “Those whose love we wanted but didn’t get, we emulate them. It is our only way to get it. So when it came time, I chose my father’s voice because there was something sacred in it to me.” He pauses. “All we know about manhood is what we have learned from our fathers. And my father was my hero, and my greatest foe.”

Like too many of us, however, by choosing to mirror the identity of someone whose absent love he longed for, Springsteen ended up not knowing who he was. He spent much of his life afraid to love or be anything more than an observer. It’s not surprising that he eventually spun out.

Springsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirty- two, around the time he released Nebraska. It is 1982, and he and his buddy Matt Delia are driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles in a 1969 Ford XL. On a late- summer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”

Backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, September 2018. Vintage Golden Beat biker jacket, H&M T-shirt, jeans, Frye boots, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.

That breakdown sent him into analysis. It—and the work he did on himself—transformed his life. He became the man he yearned to be but hadn’t known how to become. Springsteen’s desire to share his demons, and to argue for the need he believes all of us have to confront our own—this is one of the show’s great powers. We ignore our demons, he says, at our peril. The show is, as he calls it, “a magic trick.” But in other ways, as I tell Springsteen, it is a revival show—not just him energizing the audience through the power of his life-affirming, raucous songs; it is also a self-revival show. This is the work of a man revealing his flaws so that he can inspire us to redeem ourselves.

Nearly a decade after that night in Texas, Springsteen is at his home in Los Angeles. He’s living with Patti Scialfa, and they are days away from welcoming their first child, Evan. It is early morning, and there is a knock on the door: his father. Springsteen invites him in, and he and his father sit at the table. It is here, in his home, that his father tells him, “You’ve been very good to us.” Springsteen has no words. He can only nod. Then his father says, “And I wasn’t very good to you.”

“It was,” Springsteen says in the show, “the greatest moment in my life, with my dad. And it was all that I needed. . . . Here in the last days before I was to become a father, my own father was visiting me, to warn me of the mistakes that he had made, and to warn me not to make them with my own children. To release them from the chain of our sins, my father’s and mine, that they may be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives.” Late in his father’s life, Springsteen received an answer that gave him even deeper insight. He learned that all those nights Doug Springsteen sat alone, brooding, silent, in the dark of that kitchen, he was a man lost. A man who would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The diagnosis gave Springsteen context to his boyhood. But it also gave him a new fear.

As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.”

Twenty years ago this past spring, his father died at age seventy-three in hospice, cradled in Adele’s arms. On the day of the funeral, after the priest finished his prayers at the graveside of the family plot in Freehold, Springsteen sent away the mourners and remained behind with only a few close friends and relatives. Then he took a shovel and moved every last bit of dirt onto his father’s grave.

That’s quite biblical, what you did, I say to him. Burying your father’s body with your own hands.

“I wanted that connection,” he says. “It meant a lot to me.”

I ask him: Will you be buried there, too? In the family plot in St. Rose of Lima Cemetery?

He looks off toward the mirror, pauses. And then comes the short laugh. “That’s a big question,” he says. “And I’ve asked myself that question on a variety of occasions. Will I end up there? I don’t know. I think I’ll just be . . . I think I’ll just spread myself around a little bit. Maybe a little in the ocean. [Laughs] A little in town. Here and there.”

Is there anything your father never said to you that you wish he had said? Were there any words unspoken?

Springsteen’s parents in a New Jersey diner.

“Well,” Springsteen says, “he never said, ‘I love you.’ ”

Never?

“Nope. He never got around to it.”

Not even when he lay dying?

“Nope.”

Does that hurt you?

Springsteen pauses again and looks back toward his mirror. Then: “No. Because (a) I know he did. And (b) it just wasn’t in his repertoire. So he showed me he did, on many occasions. And so that was fine. My father was so nonverbal that . . . he cried whenever he left. When you’d say, ‘I gotta go now, Dad’—boom!—tears. Later in his life, the last ten years, he was very visibly emotional.”

I tell him that there is a line in the show where he says of his father, “If I had a wish, oh, man, it’d be that he could be here to see this”—and then I ask, Is there something you’d want to hear from him?

Springsteen goes silent. Then: “Honestly, I would have liked him to see who I was. That was what I was always running up against. He couldn’t see who I was. I mean, that’s what your children want from you—you are the audience. I figured that out really early in my kids’ lives. That’s the natural role of things. So somewhere inside of me, I still wanted my dad to be my audience. I wanted him to be mine. I wish for further and deeper understanding of who we both were.”

Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twenty- eight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twenty- four, is a firefighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was fighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home filled him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.”

Springsteen with his wife Vivienne Patricia Scialfa in Rome in September 2015.

He credits Scialfa, his wife of twenty-seven years, with inspiring him to be a better man, with saving him. (“By her intelligence and love she showed me that our family was a sign of strength, that we were formidable and could take on and enjoy much of the world.”) It’s no wonder that he brings her out in the center of the show and duets with her on “Tougher Than the Rest” as well as “Brilliant Disguise.” You read his book and you see the wisdom and sensitivity she brought to their relationship. It’s Scialfa who, when the kids are small, goes to Bruce, the lifelong nocturnal creature, and says, “You’re going to miss it.” What? he asks. “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most.” Cut to: Bruce, remaking himself as the early- morning-breakfast dad. “Should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold a job between the hours of 5:00 and 11:00 a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy, and I received my rewards: the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster.”

And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now.

“My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.”

But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today?

“Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]”

I ask him to define the qualities that make up a good man today.

“I do have two good men. And I would say their qualities are, they’re sensitive. They’re respectful of others. They are not locked into a 1950s sensibility of manhood, which I had to contend with. Consequently, their attitudes toward women and the world are free of those archetypes, and that frees them to be who they are and have deeper and more meaningful relationships. They know themselves pretty well, which is something I can’t say for myself when I was that age. They know—and can show—love. And they know how to receive love. They know what to do with their problems. I think they have a sense of process as to how to work on themselves, which is something that I certainly didn’t have at twenty-five. These are the things that I’m proud of my boys for. They are quite different from my generation.”

And what about your daughter, who is navigating a world that has had a rebirth of misogyny—do you and Patti talk to her about this?

“She’s learned quite a bit, even through the few serious relationships that she’s had. And what do I notice? It seems to me like women today learn a lot quicker. She came with a set of tools that—and I have to credit most of this to Patti, because Patti was just very in tune with all the kids all the time—allowed her to make her way through the world in a very aware way. Consequently, there’s a lot of bullshit she doesn’t put up with. My daughter—she’s really tough. She’s in a tough sport. She’s physically very brave, very strong, and mentally very, very tough. That came through Patti. Patti was very independent. So she has a roaring independence that has served her very well.”

A “roaring independence.” I like that.

“Yeah.” [Chuckles]

There’s a lot of noise right now about what a man is.

“My kids aren’t confused by that.”

If you had to say, “Here are the qualities you should seek to instill in your young man,” what would you say?

“The funny thing is . . . if you’re present from when they’re young and if you comport yourself even reasonably well, they pick up a lot of healthy habits. And that discussion happens implicitly. By your behavior at home and how you treat your partner and what they see. I by no means have been perfect. But if you give a reasonable presentation of yourself, a lot of that occurs implicitly.”

Why, I ask, do so many men, whether they’re sixty-five or twenty-five, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?

Springsteen sighs. “I would go back to DNA. If you grow up in a household where people are refusing to take responsibility for their lives, chances are you’re gonna refuse. You’re gonna see yourself as a professional victim. And once that’s locked into you, it takes a lotta self-awareness, a lotta work to come out from under it. I’m shocked at the number of people that I know who fall into this category. And it has nothing to do with whether you’re successful or not. It’s just your baggage. So that’s important to communicate to your children: They have to take responsibility for who they are, their actions, what they do. They’ve got to own their lives.”

Is there, I ask, a code that you live by?

“I’ve never tried to articulate it, to be honest. The qualities that my mother has are ones that I’ve tried to foster in myself. So what do I say? Kindness, a certain kind of gentleness that’s girded by strength. Thoughtfulness, which is very difficult for a narcissist like myself to deliver on a daily basis. I’ve had to get around my own self-involvement, which is one of the natural characteristics of the artist. If I had to say something, I’d say, ‘I’m steadfast, honest, and true.’ ”

Steadfast, honest, and true. If this is his motto, it also represents the qualities his fans project onto him. These are the values Springsteen seems to embody that create such a bond with his audience. Because of this, they believe he knows them. And gives voice to their heartaches, as well as to the better selves they aspire to be. But he has also sought, especially in the second half of his career, to write songs that speak to social and class issues. He’s always revered folkies like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and around the time he released his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, he began to strive to create songs that found the intersection between “The River” and “This Land Is Your Land.” A place where, as he says, “the political and personal came together to spill clear water into the muddy river of history.”

I say to Springsteen, In your book, you write this about America: “Dread—the sense that things might not work out, that the moral high ground had been swept out from underneath us, that the dream we had of ourselves had somehow been tainted and the future would forever be uninsured—was in the air.” I tell him: What’s strange is that this is not you describing the mood of this country in 2018; this is you writing about the country in 1978, forty years earlier, at the time you wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town. Yet those words feel like they are about this country right now. Do you think America is worse or better? “I don’t think it’s better.”

You mean it’s worse? I ask.

“Well, I guess forty years-plus would make it worse. And I do feel that people feel under siege, and sometimes for reasons that I don’t agree with and that are unfortunate. Like I say, whether it’s the changing face of the nation or . . . I think those people legitimately feel under siege. Their way of life is somehow threatened—is existentially threatened. And maybe that explains Trump and maybe it doesn’t, but . . . that’s always been a part of the American story. It continues to be a part of it today. At the time when I wrote those songs, I suppose it was a lot of what I was seeing around me.”

There comes a moment in the show, before he sings “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which was inspired by John Ford’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when he gives a beautiful reflection on how sacred he feels democracy is. He speaks of how “these are times when we’ve also seen folks marching, and in the highest offices of our land, who want to speak to our darkest angels, who want to call up the ugliest and most divisive ghosts of America’s past. And they want to destroy the idea of an America for all. That’s their intention.”

So I ask him: Who are the “they”?

“Well,” he says, “I would be talking about our president. Probably number one. [He] has no interest in uniting the country, really, and actually has an interest in doing the opposite and dividing us, which he does on an almost daily basis. So that’s simply a crime against humanity, as far as I’m concerned. It’s an awful, awful message to send out into the world if you’re in that job and in that position. It’s just an ugly, awful message. You are intentionally trying to disenfranchise a large portion of Americans. I mean, you are simply . . . that’s unforgivable. And then there’s just the rise of—whether it’s the alt-right or the folks who were marching in Charlottesville with their tiki torches and all of that coming to the fore again, you know? Which our president was more than happy to play into and to play to. So these are folks who are invested in denying the idea of a united America and an America for all. It’s a critical moment. This has come so far to the surface, and it’s so toxic. And it appears to have a grip . . . and to be so powerful . . . in a lot of people’s lives at the moment. It’s a scary moment for any conscientious American, I think.”

And if you could, I say to him, make one request of citizens in this country right now, what would it be?

A long silence follows. Springsteen turns back to the mirror and, at the same time, draws both of his booted feet up to the edge of the couch. He resembles a man squatting beside a campfire, watching flames. “I think that a lot of what’s going on has been a large group of people frightened by the changing face of the nation. There seems to be an awful lot of fear. The founding fathers were pretty good at confronting their fears and the fears of the country. And it’s the old cliché where geniuses built the system so an idiot could run it. We are completely testing that theory at this very moment. I do believe we’ll survive Trump. But I don’t know if I see a unifying figure on the horizon. That worries me. Because the partisanship and the country being split down the middle is something that’s gravely dangerous. To go back to your question, what would my wish be? [Sighs] It’s corny stuff, but: Let people view themselves as Americans first, that the basic founding principles of the country could be adhered to, whether it’s equality or social justice. Let people give each other a chance.”

"[DONALD TRUMP] HAS NO INTEREST IN UNITING THE COUNTRY, REALLY."

In the show, Springsteen plays many moments for laughs. He’s a natural actor, with a gift for landing a line or milking a moment. He’s also good at building the intensity of a story—or, if he has to, deflating it, as he does at one point when he shifts gears for an intense stretch and jokes, “I’m going to release you from suicide watch right now.” But as I prepare for our final meeting, I find myself thinking he may be hiding in plain sight. I think about his description of his second breakdown, which descended upon him a few years after he turned sixty. It was a darkness that lasted on and off for three years; it was, he writes, “an attack of what was called an ‘agitated depression.’ During this period, I was so profoundly uncomfortable in my own skin that I just wanted OUT. It feels dangerous and brings plenty of unwanted thoughts. . . . Demise and foreboding were all that awaited.”

It is the writing of a man desperate to escape profound pain. So when I see him, I ask: Have you ever attempted to take your life? “No, no, no.”

But have you ever contemplated suicide?

“I once felt bad enough to say, ‘I don’t know if I can live like this.’ It was like . . .” He pauses for a moment. Then: “I once got into some sort of box where I couldn’t figure my way out and where the feelings were so overwhelmingly uncomfortable.”

Was that during your first breakdown?

“No. This was the ‘agitated depression’ I talk about in the book, where feelings became so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that I simply couldn’t find a twelve-by-twelve piece of the floor to stand on, where I could feel a sense of peace on.” As he tells me this, he brings his hands up to either side of his face, framing it like blinders on a horse, as though trying to conjure that small square of safe space. Trying to see it. Then he says, all the while still holding his blinder hands to the sides of his head: “I had no inner peace whatsoever. And I said, ‘Gee, I really don’t know. I don’t know how long I could . . .’ It was a manic state, and it was just so profoundly emotionally and spiritually and physically uncomfortable that the only thing I’ve ever said was ‘Gee, I don’t know, man . . .’ It gave me a little insight into . . .”

Springsteen’s voice trails off and he slowly lets his hands fall into his lap. For a moment, neither one of us says anything. Then I break the silence and ask: Did you think you should be hospitalized?

“No one was saying that I should be . . .” Springsteen gives me a wry smile. “I had a couple very good doctors. But, unfortunately, it was August. That’s when they all take off.” Springsteen lets out one of his short, raspy laughs. “All I remember was feeling really badly and calling for help. I might have gotten close to that and for brief, brief periods of time. It lasted for—I don’t know. Looking back on it now, I can’t say. Was it a couple weeks? Was it a month? Was it longer? But it was a very bad spell, and it just came. . . . Once again—DNA. And it came out of the roots that I came out of, particularly on my father’s side, where I had to cop to the fact that I also had things inside me that could lead me to pretty bad places.”

Greeting fans outside the Walter Kerr Theatre. Vintage Golden Bear biker jacket, All Saints T-shirt, jeans, Frye boots, and jewelry, Sprinsteen’s own.

And when you see someone like Anthony Bourdain, can you understand how that happens?

“Well, I had a very, very close friend who committed suicide. He was like an older son to me. I mentored him. And he got very, very ill. So, ultimately, it always remains a mystery—those last moments. I always say, Well, somebody was in a bad place, and they just got caught out in the rain. Another night, another way, someone else there . . . it might not have happened.” He pauses. “They were ill, and they got caught out in the rain. . . . I don’t know anyone who’s ever explained satisfactorily the moments that lead up to someone taking that action. So can I understand how that happens? Yes. I think I felt just enough despair myself to—pain gets too great, confusion gets too great, and that’s your out. But I don’t have any great insight into it, and in truth, I’ve never met someone who has.”

Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?

“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”

I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”

“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”

I ask if he has spent his life trying to love that boy his father denied.

“Those were big moments that I had through my analysis. I saw myself as a child and experienced my own innocence and realized, Oh my God, I was so fragile. I was so easily broken and dismissed. My father taught me to hate that person. So it took me quite a while to come back around and make my peace with who I was. That was a lot of what I was doing through my playing—trying to come to a place where I could just stand myself. [Laughs] It was just developing a self that allowed me to live with myself in a way that a lot of the self-loathing didn’t allow. That’s just a part of my DNA. I do a lot better with it now, but it’s an ongoing struggle.

A close-up of one of Springsteen’s guitars.

“I was well into my forties before I figured this out. I don’t know how to describe [that breakthrough] except you think you’re seeing all of yourself, and then it’s like a finger pokes at this boundary in front of you and suddenly a little brick drops out, and you look through [the wall], and you go, Oh my God—there’s this entire other world in there that I’ve never seen. And a lot of it, you’ve sort of been living in—I don’t know how to describe it—a cruel universe, and it’s just a little ray of light that allows you to see more of your experience and existence. [Pauses] I mean, what are you doing in analysis? You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love—which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love. So along with that effort came the realization, through a lot of studying and analysis, of how rough I’d been on myself and had continued to be until a very late stage in life.”

I tell him I’m thinking about his lines in “The Promised Land”—“Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode . . . take a knife and cut this pain from my heart. . .”—and how for years I thought the song was about the heartbreak of losing a woman.

“It’s about existential weakness and trying to the best of your ability to transcend it.”

And the line “the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted”?

“Everybody carries those things with them. It’s a line that always penetrates. It still penetrates for me when I sing it each night.”

I tell him: You’re making me see that “The Ties That Bind” is not a love story but about the DNA family ties you can’t escape.

“The bonds of your personal family,” he says, “but also the ties you can’t break among your community and your fellow citizens. You can’t forsake those things. It’ll rot your core at the end of the day. If you want to see someone who’s—look at Trump. He has forsaken a lot of these things, and it’s affected him. He’s deeply damaged at his core.”

Because he forsook the ties, the bonds?

“Absolutely. That’s why he’s dangerous. Anyone in that position who doesn’t deeply feel those ties that bind is a dangerous man, and it’s very pitiful.”

And then I tell him I’m thinking about “Born to Run,” which contains four words in one line that are the sum of him: sadness, love, madness, and soul. “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

“Those are my lines. ‘Born to Run.’ That’s my epitaph, if you wanna know my epitaph. There it is. It still is, probably—I use the song at the end of the show every night as a summary. The idea is that it can contain all that has come before. And I believe that it does.”

Sadness, love, madness, soul. I tell him: Those are your four elements.

“The last verse of my greatest song. And that’s where it ought to end every night.” Springsteen pauses. “Twenty-four when I wrote it. Wow. It’s a . . . holds up pretty well. But I . . . that was what I was aiming for in those days—that’s what I was shooting for.”

I tell Springsteen that before I leave, I have one last question. In the book, he talks about how, when he was nineteen, he and his buddies loaded up a truck with all their worldly possessions and kissed Freehold goodbye. Yet a few years later, we learn that Springsteen, while dating a woman with a young daughter, has given the girl the rocking horse he loved as a boy.

“Ah,” Springsteen says, a look of happiness rising up in his eyes, “my rocking horse.”

Right, I say. But here’s the image I can’t square—you are a nineteen-year-old badass, ditching your hometown with your buddies. Lying on the back of a flatbed truck with a guitar and a duffel bag. And you’re telling me you have your rocking horse with you?

Springsteen looks at me like I’m crazy. “Well, it was the only thing I had left from my childhood.”

He goes on to tell me that years after giving the girl the rocking horse, he tracked down her mother and asked her to return it. The woman, however, had given it away. He pauses. I ask him if he has carried anything else with him from his childhood, and he tells me how when he was growing up, there was a merry-go-round on the Asbury Park boardwalk that he rode as a kid. “It had an arm and on the end of it, there was a gold ring. If you caught it, you got a free ride. I used to go nuts because I could never reach these rings. I rode it a thousand times. But then one night before I was about to put my first record out— I can remember the night . . . I got on the merry-go-round and bing! I grabbed the gold one.”

Where is it now? I ask.

“I keep it in my writing room, at home. And the rest is history.”

[MIKA27]

THE LAST DROP 1982 BOURBON

Age can be good or bad, depending on the context — but when it comes to whiskey, age is almost always a desirable trait. That being said, a true whiskey aficionado knows the difference between a newly-crafted spirit and one that’s aged well — the latter of which has emerged in the form of The Last Drop’s first ever American whiskey, the 1982 Kentucky Straight Bourbon.

The whiskey itself is an 18-year bourbon that was pulled from the original barrel in Frankfort, Kentucky around the turn of the century for optimal maturity. The George T. Stagg Distillery (now Buffalo Trace) helped The Last Drop to procure an extremely limited 44-unit release, with only 25 bottles making their way to the U.S. market. If you’re a fan of deep, round, and delicious notes reminiscent of dried fruit and honey, you can grab a bottle for around $4,000. Don’t worry, these last drops come with a 50ml sample replica so you don’t have to open the original container for at least a few more years. $4K

[MIKA27]

Smirnoff Vodka-Filled Ornaments

If you thought your Christmas tree was done after the post-Thanksgiving decorating bonanza, you were dead wrong. Smirnoff just dropped a whole line of vodka-filled ornaments, so there’s at least one more piece of boozy cheer you need to add the tree. Smirnoff Vodka Ornaments are the traditional globe shape and come in a number of festive holiday designs like Christmas lights, trees and plenty of snow. Each Smirnoff Vodka Ornament comes filled with Smirnoff’s No. 21 vodka, which is gluten-free, triple-distilled and perfect for classic cocktails like hard apple cider and holiday iced coffee. Smirnoff Vodka Ornaments are available almost everywhere Smirnoff products are sold. Prices start at $10 depending on where you’re located.

[MIKA27]

Whiskey Cocktails

Whiskey Cocktails is a new book that will be an excellent ice breaker and spender once you get it on your coffee table, it will serve just as good for something pleasant to look at because the artwork is exquisite, as are the photos, but also inspiring because along with the photos you get the recipe of the drink with the whiskey as the major player. You get the photos from the most fashionable and old school bars, chosen by renowned mixologist Brian Van Flander for yet another cool Assouline Edition. If this drink is the one of your choice and you’re willing to try some new combinations this book might be right for you. $50

[Duxnutz]

4 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

The Japanese Whisky Shortage Won't Stop

Earlier this year, Suntory announced that it was pulling Hakushu 12 and Hibiki 17 off the market. Now the Kirin Distillery is yanking one of the best Japanese whisky deals from shelves: Kirin Sanroku Cask Aged Spirit.

According to Sankei News, the decision was made to pull the blended whisky due to spirit shortages. Kirin doesn’t have enough of the stuff to ensure a stable blend and has to pull the blend.

Kirin Sanroku is distilled at the Kirin Gotemba Distillery at the base of Mount Fuji, which was one of the distilleries I enjoyed visiting while writing my book Japanese Whisky.

Asahi reports that sales increased 14 per cent year on year, and Gotemba is distilling at full capacity. Kirin Whisky is even looking investing in a new distillery to increase production.

Kirin might have planned better for an increase in production because a couple years ago, it retired one of its pot stills to be part of a new distillery tour exhibit. I’m sure it could now make better use of it to produce spirit than as an exhibit piece!

Bottled at 50 per cent alcohol by volume, Sanroku always been a good deal, giving consumer more whisky bang for their buck, er yen.

The blended whisky, which is made from grain and malt spirit distilled and bottled on site, used to be priced under a 1,000 yen ($12.04). However, a few years back, Kirin released a slightly more expensive non-chill filtered version, meaning that more of the original distillate characteristics should carry over to the final blend.

(The good news is that the more expensive Fuji Sanroku Signature Blend, which launched in Japan this past August, will still be available. It’s 5,400 yen ($65). Get it while you can, I guess.)

The kit that Kirin has at its Gotemba Distillery allow it to craft a spirit that is reminiscent of bourbon. One of my favourite things about Sanroku is how its bourbon-like qualities are wrapped in lush, soft Japanese whisky. This was often a blend I would recommend to people who wanted to pick up a bottle as a souvenir while in the country because it’s cheap and readily available at supermarkets.

Make that, was.

 

Four Roses yellow of jap whisky. It’s ok, nothing great. Best aspect was the price. 

[MIKA27]

After 7.0 Earthquake Shakes Alaska, Governor Says Impact Could Last 'Quite Some Time'

Alaska is now beginning to survey the damage of powerful back-to-back earthquakes that struck the area around Anchorage on Friday, an event that resulted in damage to buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. Speaking with reporters following the quake, Alaska Governor Bill Walker said that resulting disruption and needed repairs could last "quite some time."

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck around 8:29am local time followed by ensuing, smaller earthquakes. Citing United States Geological Survey research geophysicist Gavin Hayes, CNN reported Saturday that "a magnitude-5.2 aftershock about 11 p.m. Friday was the second-biggest event since a magnitude-5.7 temblor hit minutes after the main quake."

Despite earthquakes being common in the area, Friday's event was still significant.

"This is a very earthquake-prone region. Much more so than California," climatologist Brian Brettschneider told Gizmodo by email. "That said, it's been over 50 years since an earthquake this strong was felt in Anchorage. The good news is that most of Anchorage was built, or rebuilt, after the great 1964 Earthquake (M9.2). That means very strict building codes."

He also noted that there were no injuries or fatalities, adding: "If you had to be in a city of over [a quarter of a million] people and have an M7 earthquake hit, this is the best place to be."

Videos shared on social media captured widespread damage across Anchorage and the surrounding area. One video shared by Brettschneider on Twitter captured drone footage of cracks in ice at Anchorage's Waldron Lake. According to Brettschneider, the ice was 20cm thick.

Nat Herz, a reporter for Alaska Public Media, told NPR that he was sitting at a coffee shop in Anchorage when he "just felt like sort of a rumble or a buzz."

"But then things kind of got louder, and things started really shaking and shaking hard. And people were kind of looking around," he told NPR. "And then I think, you know, someone went for the door, and everyone else went for the door. And, you know, everyone kind of hurried outside. And kind of once things settled down, everyone went back in."

At least two highways were closed down following the earthquake, with local CBS affiliate KTVA reporting that area's Glenn Highway endured significant damage that included a "massive sinkhole." Power losses also reportedly affected tens of thousands of people following the initial earthquake.

Governor Walker said in a phone interview Friday that there's a possibility that some infrastructure damage could take weeks or months to repair, especially given the US winter season. Walker also said he spoke with US President Donald Trump, after which call KTVA reported the Federal Emergency Management Agency approved assistance for the area.

"It's going to be a disruption for quite some time," Walker said. "We've been on the phone with the White House a number of times today [and] took a call from [US] President Trump. They talked about their desire to help us, and we appreciate that very much."

According to Alaska Public Media, schools in the area are expected to be closed until at least Wednesday of next week.

[MIKA27]

The Cassian Andor Star Wars Show Has Found Its Showrunner

And he knows a thing or two about good spy shows. Deadline reports that Stephen Schiff has been tapped to executive producer and showrun the upcoming Cassian Andor Star Wars TV show for Disney+.

Schiff spent the last several years as a writer and executive producer on FX's The Americans, which was about a husband and wife posing as Americans, but who are really Russian spies. Many considered The Americans to be the best show on TV before it ended earlier this year, so Schiff seems like a strong choice to lead a show that will once again be about espionage and spying, just this time in a galaxy far, far, away.

Still, you can't help but scratch your head a little bit at the fact that Lucasfilm has once again hired a white male to shepherd a Star Wars project. Which is not a knock on Schiff, J.J. Abrams, Jon Favreau, Rian Johnson, DB Weiss and David Benioff, Dave Filoni, or even never-confirmed guys like Stephen Daldry or James Mangold. These are all insanely talented people.

Certainly people worthy of Star Wars. And with Favreau's show, The Mandalorian, the directors selected are incredibly diverse, which is a nice step in the right direction. But time and time again, Lucasfilm, a company predominantly run by women, has only hired white men to make content. It's almost comical at this point.

Anyway, to back off the soap box a bit, no matter who the show runner is, it's possible we're even more excited for the potential of a Cassian Andor show than The Mandalorian, and that's saying something. Seeing the early days of the Rebellion from a character like Cassian, hopefully with K-2SO by his side, is going to be awesome.

So the fact there's finally a captain at the helm, and writers have begun to be hired, just means it's going to be here that much sooner.

It's expected to start filming in 2019.

[MIKA27]

Richard Branson Says He's Going To Send People Into Space By Christmas

Billionaire Richard Branson really, really wants you to believe he's going to send people to space — and soon. In a new interview with CNN, the Virgin Group founder now says he's "reasonably confident" his spaceflight company can beat out competitors like Blue Origin and SpaceX with crewed trips to space before Christmas.

Pointing to Branson's long-touted plans to send humans to space — and specifically addressing the gap between 2007, when Branson originally said that Virgin Galactic would send people to space, and now — CNN's Rachel Crane asked how badly Branson wanted to "prove [his] critics wrong."

"Space is difficult. Rocket science is rocket science. This has taken us 14 long years, and it's taken Jeff Bezos 14 long years," Branson said, referencing the Amazon CEO's private spaceflight company Blue Origin, which plans to begin selling tickets for suborbital flights next year.

As Crane noted, Virgin Galactic has a track record of promising that the company is close to transporting people to space only to fall short. And that was even before the company's ambitious plans were derailed by the VSS Enterprise test flight crash in 2014 that killed a pilot and injured a co-pilot.

Notably, it was only this year that Virgin Galactic resumed crewed test flights with its new SpaceShipTwo aircraft. Still, Branson said that he is "reasonably confident that before Christmas we will [send people to space]."

According to CNN, test pilots will be the first to make the trip to space with Virgin Galactic, though Branson plans to take the trip himself as its first passenger. (His children will likely follow as among the first passengers to travel with Virgin Galactic to space, he said.) But Branson told CNN he wasn't "allowed up until the [test pilots] have broken it in a few times, first." According to CNN:

Quote

 

SpaceShipTwo, Galactic's rocket-powered plane, will fly into space after it detaches from beneath the wing of a mothership. It has been thoroughly tested on the ground and at lower altitudes, Branson said. But, the first few flights to space will be "the dangerous ones."

The pilots will fly the space plane at at [sic] 2,300 miles per hour [3700km/h], accelerating to top speed in about eight seconds, Branson said.

 

If Virgin Galactic is indeed able to meet what seems at present to be an extraordinary deadline, CNN noted that it will beat out the space ambitions of both Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, the latter of which is currently preparing for an unpiloted SpaceX Crew Dragon test flight in January ahead of a targeted crewed mission in June.

While Branson noted that safety is paramount when sending people into space, he added: "Virgin Galactic will be the first."

We'll see.

[MIKA27]

Geologists Joke About 'Sea Monster' After Mysterious 30-Minute Rumble Emanates From Waters Near Madagascar

Between Mozambique and Madagascar lies the island of Mayotte. Since May 10, the French Geological Survey has been keeping an eye on a collection of earthquakes taking place just off the island's eastern shores, which peaked with a magnitude 5.8 shake. This swarm was curious enough all by itself — and then, on November 11, things took a peculiar turn.

That day, seismographs all over the world registered a very low-frequency tremor, a strange grumble that lasted for around 30 minutes. One segment of the signal also featured several high-frequency blips, each separated by roughly a minute of time, a bit like a regular, ticking clock.

Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the University of Southampton, highlighted the phenomenon in a November 12 tweet. "Something biggggg, yet strangely slow, sent seismic rumblings around the surface of much of the planet yesterday," he wrote.

Today, that succinct summary still holds, even as discussion of the event continues between geoscientists of all kinds over on Twitter.

To date, no one is quite sure what caused it. It wasn't a tectonic earthquake, a landslide, nor a meteorite impact. Some experts baffled by the seismic enigma have not-so-seriously suggested that perhaps, finally, it's sea monsters.

The strange sound was almost certainly not Godzilla taking a submarine stroll, but scientists are starting to coalesce around what they suspect may be the answer: strange and unseen movements of magma, far beneath the seafloor.

In order to understand why, though, we have to go back to the very beginning.

Robin Lacassin, a geologist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics, told Gizmodo that Mayotte is part of the Comoros archipelago, a chain of volcanic islands that first saw fireworks 20 million years ago. Eruptions have flared up in recent times on other islands, most notably Grande Comore. Conversely, Mayotte, a comparatively dormant presence, hasn't seen any fresh lava for around 4000 years.

In any case, volcanism in the region — powered by a small rising mantle plume or a deformed tectonic plate — is alive and kicking. The swarm of earthquakes taking place near Mayotte, although new for the area, resemble those produced by magmatic processes of some kind, including the movement of magma and other superheated fluids.

The November 11 signal, however, is a very different kettle of fish. No specific natural process has yet been linked to the seismic data, and the lack of monitoring at the site of the event means even its precise location is currently unclear.

First, let's look at that low-frequency hum. Representing surface waves travelling across the planet, this dominated the global signal. High-frequency waves were not picked up by distant stations.

Hicks told Gizmodo that a good analogy here is someone living down the road from a nightclub. You might not be next door, but as long as the energy behind the beats is high enough, "what you'll hear is the bass, not the higher-pitched stuff," which weakens relatively quickly.

Potent bass lines can be created by many slow, powerful events, from tectonic earthquakes to submarine landslides and even glacial calvings. In this case, the tide gauges failed to show any changes during the event, meaning there were no mass movements on the seafloor of any kind. The few GPS stations in the region recorded some local seafloor movement, but just a little, suggesting the signal's source was fairly deep.

The only plausible explanation remaining was some sort of volcanism. That's perfectly reasonable; after all, Mayotte is volcanic, and the swarm resembles volcanic activity. Anthony Lomax, a consulting seismologist, told Gizmodo that it's probably "volcanic activity, causing earthquakes."

Although a submarine eruption cannot be ruled out, there are as yet no observable signs that one took place, like fresh lava on the seafloor or a floating raft of pumice at the surface. Instead, Lacassin said that all the data points to the movement of magma within the crust. But where exactly was it going?

A day after the event, researchers at the ENS University in Paris suspected magma was draining from the site, causing the roof of a reservoir of magma to collapse and cause quakes. In a statement, they reckoned that 1.25km³ of magma draining from a reservoir would fit the GPS data well.

A good comparison here, according to Lomax, is what was seen recently at Kilauea in Hawaii. During that eruption, magma continuously drained from the summit crater. The crater deflated, causing earthquakes, and magma escaped underground to the volcano's eastern flanks.

However, Hicks' initial analysis of the available data seemed to indicate magma was moving into a reservoir and inflating it. Jean Paul Ampuero, a seismologist and director of research at France's Research Institute for Development, agreed. "Collapse events or inflation events have opposite signs," he told Gizmodo. "This one is of the inflation type."

At the time of writing, Hicks' analysis is leaning towards drainage again. Either way, it's got to be moving magma, but nothing's certain yet.

The deficit of instruments near the signal site means "there are no real before-and-after datasets," Helen Robinson, a geothermal expert and PhD candidate at Glasgow University, told Gizmodo. Useful information as to what physically changed at that spot near Mayotte doesn't really exist.

The key piece of evidence here is the seismic signal, which certainly shows the ghost of something strange. The signal is so utterly weird, though, that it's proving difficult to decipher.

Ampuero said he spoke to a colleague of his whose expertise is in the seismology of volcanoes. They confirmed that the internal chaos of volcanoes can cause very low-frequency hums, but the incredibly long 30-minute duration of this one was currently inexplicable.

In order to get this sort of prolonged, low-frequency grumble, you'd need something big to resonate. "It's like a ringing bell. If you want to get a very low frequency, a very low tone, you need that bell to be huge," Ampuero explained. "Maybe the magma reservoir has been hit by a wave of little quakes, and then kept ringing for a little while."

Then, there are those clockwork-like high-frequency blips, which revealed themselves after seismologists began filtering out the signal's deep hum. Robinson explained that such blips are like those detected when rock is being fractured as magma forces its way through.

"What baffles me is how evenly spaced out they were," she said. "I have no idea how to explain that." Neither, as it turns out, can anyone else.

Signals with very regular intervals tend to be artificially generated, but they can have natural origins. Just take pulsars: When these rapidly rotating, lighthouse-like objects were discovered in the 1960s, the regularity of the flashes were briefly suspected of being generated by intelligent life. The original source was even dubbed LGM, for "little green men."

Here, the high-frequency blips instinctively brought industrial or military activity to Robinson's mind, but there is no sign of anything of the sort in the region. In this case, the regularity could perhaps be magma moving at a constant rate through the rock, causing repeating fractures. Like much about the signal, this interpretation is far from certain.

Lomax brings up the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, which tells the tale of said men encountering an elephant for the first time, with each trying to identify what it is by touching just one part of it. Similarly, researchers of different geoscience stripes are giving their own interpretation of the curious signal.

"That's a good start, because you want different takes from different directions," Lomax said. Cracking the case, however, is a team effort. Fortunately, judging by the frenetic scientific discussion still taking place on social media, that's already in full swing.

[Ken Gargett]

On 11/30/2018 at 2:45 PM, MIKA27 said:

BENEATH THE SURFACE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

Source: Esquire

For more than fifty years, he’s traveled deep into the heart of @Ken Gargett and America. But with his new Netflix special—a film of his intense, powerful one-man show on Broadway—Bruce Springsteen reveals that his bravest journey has been wrestling with his own mental health.

The first time I meet Bruce Springsteen is backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where he is in the homestretch of performing his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway. It is a few weeks before I am supposed to sit with him for an interview, but his publicist has asked me to come by before this performance so he can, I deduce, check me out. I arrive at 7:00 and am directed to a small couch near the backstage bathroom. Finally, five minutes before curtain, I see, coming down the stairs that lead to his dressing room, a pair of black work boots and black-legged jeans. Springsteen ducks his head beneath a low arch and walks toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m Bruce.” We shake hands, and then there is silence. He looks at me and I look at him, not sure what to say. At five-foot-ten, he’s taller than you think he’ll be; somehow, he remains the runty-scrawny kid in the leather jacket, possibly dwarfed in our minds due to the years he spent leaning against Clarence Clemons.

That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I find it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netflix as a film. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right.

"DNA.”

This is, curiously, the first word that Springsteen says when he takes the stage. An unlikely, unromantic, unpoetic choice for a man who has always been more about the sensory than science. Yet in many ways, DNA is Springsteen’s unrelenting antagonist, the costar that he battles against. This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire—will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am?

A few minutes later, in the show, he talks about the moment that opened his eyes to what was possible if one believed in the power of self-creation. It’s a Sunday night in 1956, and an almost seven-year-old Springsteen is sitting in front of the TV with his mother, Adele, in the living room of the tiny four-room house in Freehold, New Jersey, that he shares with his parents and sister. This is the night he sees Elvis Presley. In that moment, when he receives that vision, he realizes that there is another way, that he can create an identity apart from “the lifeless, sucking black hole” that is his childhood.

“All you needed to do,” Springsteen says when he unpacks the lesson Elvis taught him, “was to risk being your true self.” 

Yeah. . .,” Springsteen says when I sit down with him a couple weeks later and tell him it seems the essential question of his show is “Are we bound by what courses through our veins?” He looks off to his left into his dressing-room mirror, the surface of which is checkerboarded with photographs, much as a mirror in a teenage boy’s bedroom might be. Among the many images: John Lennon in his NEW YORK CITY T-shirt. A young Paul McCartney. Patti Smith. Johnny Cash. They are, as Springsteen tells me later, “the ancestors.” It’s into this mirror and toward these talismans that Springsteen often gazes when he is answering my questions. He’s a deep listener and acts with intent. He has a calm nature and possesses a low, soft voice. He has a tendency to be self-deprecating, preemptively labeling certain thoughts “corny.” He smiles easily and likes to sip ginger ale. Sometimes before telling you something personal, he lets out a short, nervous laugh. Above all, he speaks with the unveiledness of a man who has spent more than three decades undergoing analysis—and credits it with saving his life.

His cramped dressing room looks more like the “office” the superintendent of your prewar apartment building carves out for himself in the basement, next to the boiler. Much of it feels scavenged. There’s a brown leather couch and a beat-up coffee table. Nailed up above the couch is a faded, forty-eight-star American flag and a ragged strand of white Christmas-tree lights. Now Springsteen sits on the couch before me, dressed in black jeans and a white V-neck T-shirt that reveals a faint scar at the base of his neck—the scar that remains from a few years ago, when surgeons cut him open to repair deterioration on some cervical discs in his neck that had been causing numbness on the left side of his body. On his right ring finger is a gold ring in the shape of a horseshoe. 

Finally, he speaks.

“DNA is a big part of what the show is about: turning yourself into a free agent. Or, as much as you can, into an adult, for lack of a better word. It’s a coming-of-age story, and I want to show how this—one’s coming of age—has to be earned. It’s not given to anyone. It takes a certain single-minded purpose. It takes self-awareness, a desire to go there. And a willingness to confront all the very fearsome and dangerous elements of your life—your past, your history—that you need to confront to become as much of a free agent as you can. This is what the show is about...It’s me reciting my ‘Song of Myself.’ ”

But as you learn after spending time with him, there is what is on the surface and then there is what is below. Because the show is also about other tensions: solitude versus love (the ability to give it as well as receive it); the psychological versus the spiritual; the death force versus the life force; and, most of all, the father versus the son. Yes, it is about his struggle to find his true self, his identity. But most of all, it is about his father—and Springsteen’s search to find peace with the man who created him but, in many ways, almost destroyed him. Here’s Springsteen describing in his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, how he saw himself as a young boy, and how his father perceived him:

Weirdo sissy-boy. Outcast. Alienated. Alienating. Shy. Soft-hearted dreamer. A forever-doubting mind. The playground loneliness . . . “[I had] a gentleness, a timidity, shyness, and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I wore on the outside and the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled [my father]. It made him angry.”

He tells me his father made him ashamed that he was not hard like him but more like his mother. “My mother was kind and compassionate and very considerate of others’ feelings. She trod through the world with purpose, but softly, lightly. All those were the things that aligned with my own spirit. That was who I was. They came naturally to me. My father looked at all those things as weaknesses. He was very dismissive of primarily who I was. And that sends you off on a lifelong quest to sort through that.”

Doug Springsteen was a stout man Springsteen remembers as “two hundred and thirty pounds of nickels in Sears slacks” and, at one point, as having the “face of Satan.” He worked a range of blue-collar jobs, from floor boy in a rug mill to bus driver, yet his primary occupation was not outside the house but inside; he dominated the family home, ruling his small kingdom with silence and menace. His throne was a chair at the kitchen table. Night after night, he’d sit in the darkness, drinking and brooding. “It was,” Springsteen writes, “the silent, dormant volcano of the old man’s nightly kitchen vigil, the stillness covering a red misting rage. All of this sat on top of a sea of fear and depression so vast I hadn’t begun to contemplate it.”

Springsteen jamming at age 20.

When I ask Springsteen about his childhood, he tells me, “There was the house—and then there was what was happening in the kitchen. And when you went into the kitchen, the force of what was going on there was intimidating. But you had to deal with it. So the kitchen became freighted with meaning and danger. It was a dark, quiet place. The air was thick. So thick. Like swimming through dark molasses. You had to make your way through and make your way out—without disturbing, or creating too much attention toward yourself.”

I tell him I find it interesting that he smashed that silence with rock ’n’ roll. A joyful noise.

“When I was a child, and into my teens,” he says, “I felt like a very, very empty vessel. And it wasn’t until I began to fill it up with music that I began to feel my own personal power and my impact on my friends and the small world that I was in. I began to get some sense of myself. But it came out of a place of real emptiness.” He pauses. “I made music for that kitchen. Go to Nebraska and listen to it. But I also made music for my mother’s part of the house, which was quite joyful and bright.” He locks his eyes on me. “You have to put together a person from all the stuff that you’ve been handed.”

It was his father’s distance and silence that Springsteen rebelled against, yet his father’s identity is what he embraced. Because when Springsteen decided to adopt a rock ’n’ roll identity, what did he do? He stole his father’s work clothes and his persona—if Doug Springsteen wouldn’t love his true son, maybe at least he’d love a reflection of his son as himself.

One of the rawest stretches of the show comes when he sings “My Father’s House,” from his sixth album, Nebraska. After, he speaks of still, forever, being a boy who yearns for his father’s love: “Those whose love we wanted but didn’t get, we emulate them. It is our only way to get it. So when it came time, I chose my father’s voice because there was something sacred in it to me.” He pauses. “All we know about manhood is what we have learned from our fathers. And my father was my hero, and my greatest foe.”

Like too many of us, however, by choosing to mirror the identity of someone whose absent love he longed for, Springsteen ended up not knowing who he was. He spent much of his life afraid to love or be anything more than an observer. It’s not surprising that he eventually spun out.

Springsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirty- two, around the time he released Nebraska. It is 1982, and he and his buddy Matt Delia are driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles in a 1969 Ford XL. On a late- summer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.”

Backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, September 2018. Vintage Golden Beat biker jacket, H&M T-shirt, jeans, Frye boots, and jewelry, Springsteen’s own.

That breakdown sent him into analysis. It—and the work he did on himself—transformed his life. He became the man he yearned to be but hadn’t known how to become. Springsteen’s desire to share his demons, and to argue for the need he believes all of us have to confront our own—this is one of the show’s great powers. We ignore our demons, he says, at our peril. The show is, as he calls it, “a magic trick.” But in other ways, as I tell Springsteen, it is a revival show—not just him energizing the audience through the power of his life-affirming, raucous songs; it is also a self-revival show. This is the work of a man revealing his flaws so that he can inspire us to redeem ourselves.

Nearly a decade after that night in Texas, Springsteen is at his home in Los Angeles. He’s living with Patti Scialfa, and they are days away from welcoming their first child, Evan. It is early morning, and there is a knock on the door: his father. Springsteen invites him in, and he and his father sit at the table. It is here, in his home, that his father tells him, “You’ve been very good to us.” Springsteen has no words. He can only nod. Then his father says, “And I wasn’t very good to you.”

“It was,” Springsteen says in the show, “the greatest moment in my life, with my dad. And it was all that I needed. . . . Here in the last days before I was to become a father, my own father was visiting me, to warn me of the mistakes that he had made, and to warn me not to make them with my own children. To release them from the chain of our sins, my father’s and mine, that they may be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives.” Late in his father’s life, Springsteen received an answer that gave him even deeper insight. He learned that all those nights Doug Springsteen sat alone, brooding, silent, in the dark of that kitchen, he was a man lost. A man who would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The diagnosis gave Springsteen context to his boyhood. But it also gave him a new fear.

As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.”

Twenty years ago this past spring, his father died at age seventy-three in hospice, cradled in Adele’s arms. On the day of the funeral, after the priest finished his prayers at the graveside of the family plot in Freehold, Springsteen sent away the mourners and remained behind with only a few close friends and relatives. Then he took a shovel and moved every last bit of dirt onto his father’s grave.

That’s quite biblical, what you did, I say to him. Burying your father’s body with your own hands.

“I wanted that connection,” he says. “It meant a lot to me.”

I ask him: Will you be buried there, too? In the family plot in St. Rose of Lima Cemetery?

He looks off toward the mirror, pauses. And then comes the short laugh. “That’s a big question,” he says. “And I’ve asked myself that question on a variety of occasions. Will I end up there? I don’t know. I think I’ll just be . . . I think I’ll just spread myself around a little bit. Maybe a little in the ocean. [Laughs] A little in town. Here and there.”

Is there anything your father never said to you that you wish he had said? Were there any words unspoken?

Springsteen’s parents in a New Jersey diner.

“Well,” Springsteen says, “he never said, ‘I love you.’ ”

Never?

“Nope. He never got around to it.”

Not even when he lay dying?

“Nope.”

Does that hurt you?

Springsteen pauses again and looks back toward his mirror. Then: “No. Because (a) I know he did. And (b) it just wasn’t in his repertoire. So he showed me he did, on many occasions. And so that was fine. My father was so nonverbal that . . . he cried whenever he left. When you’d say, ‘I gotta go now, Dad’—boom!—tears. Later in his life, the last ten years, he was very visibly emotional.”

I tell him that there is a line in the show where he says of his father, “If I had a wish, oh, man, it’d be that he could be here to see this”—and then I ask, Is there something you’d want to hear from him?

Springsteen goes silent. Then: “Honestly, I would have liked him to see who I was. That was what I was always running up against. He couldn’t see who I was. I mean, that’s what your children want from you—you are the audience. I figured that out really early in my kids’ lives. That’s the natural role of things. So somewhere inside of me, I still wanted my dad to be my audience. I wanted him to be mine. I wish for further and deeper understanding of who we both were.”

Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twenty- eight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twenty- four, is a firefighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was fighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home filled him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.”

Springsteen with his wife Vivienne Patricia Scialfa in Rome in September 2015.

He credits Scialfa, his wife of twenty-seven years, with inspiring him to be a better man, with saving him. (“By her intelligence and love she showed me that our family was a sign of strength, that we were formidable and could take on and enjoy much of the world.”) It’s no wonder that he brings her out in the center of the show and duets with her on “Tougher Than the Rest” as well as “Brilliant Disguise.” You read his book and you see the wisdom and sensitivity she brought to their relationship. It’s Scialfa who, when the kids are small, goes to Bruce, the lifelong nocturnal creature, and says, “You’re going to miss it.” What? he asks. “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most.” Cut to: Bruce, remaking himself as the early- morning-breakfast dad. “Should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold a job between the hours of 5:00 and 11:00 a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy, and I received my rewards: the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster.”

And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now.

“My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.”

But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today?

“Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]”

I ask him to define the qualities that make up a good man today.

“I do have two good men. And I would say their qualities are, they’re sensitive. They’re respectful of others. They are not locked into a 1950s sensibility of manhood, which I had to contend with. Consequently, their attitudes toward women and the world are free of those archetypes, and that frees them to be who they are and have deeper and more meaningful relationships. They know themselves pretty well, which is something I can’t say for myself when I was that age. They know—and can show—love. And they know how to receive love. They know what to do with their problems. I think they have a sense of process as to how to work on themselves, which is something that I certainly didn’t have at twenty-five. These are the things that I’m proud of my boys for. They are quite different from my generation.”

And what about your daughter, who is navigating a world that has had a rebirth of misogyny—do you and Patti talk to her about this?

“She’s learned quite a bit, even through the few serious relationships that she’s had. And what do I notice? It seems to me like women today learn a lot quicker. She came with a set of tools that—and I have to credit most of this to Patti, because Patti was just very in tune with all the kids all the time—allowed her to make her way through the world in a very aware way. Consequently, there’s a lot of bullshit she doesn’t put up with. My daughter—she’s really tough. She’s in a tough sport. She’s physically very brave, very strong, and mentally very, very tough. That came through Patti. Patti was very independent. So she has a roaring independence that has served her very well.”

A “roaring independence.” I like that.

“Yeah.” [Chuckles]

There’s a lot of noise right now about what a man is.

“My kids aren’t confused by that.”

If you had to say, “Here are the qualities you should seek to instill in your young man,” what would you say?

“The funny thing is . . . if you’re present from when they’re young and if you comport yourself even reasonably well, they pick up a lot of healthy habits. And that discussion happens implicitly. By your behavior at home and how you treat your partner and what they see. I by no means have been perfect. But if you give a reasonable presentation of yourself, a lot of that occurs implicitly.”

Why, I ask, do so many men, whether they’re sixty-five or twenty-five, refuse to take responsibility for their actions?

Springsteen sighs. “I would go back to DNA. If you grow up in a household where people are refusing to take responsibility for their lives, chances are you’re gonna refuse. You’re gonna see yourself as a professional victim. And once that’s locked into you, it takes a lotta self-awareness, a lotta work to come out from under it. I’m shocked at the number of people that I know who fall into this category. And it has nothing to do with whether you’re successful or not. It’s just your baggage. So that’s important to communicate to your children: They have to take responsibility for who they are, their actions, what they do. They’ve got to own their lives.”

Is there, I ask, a code that you live by?

“I’ve never tried to articulate it, to be honest. The qualities that my mother has are ones that I’ve tried to foster in myself. So what do I say? Kindness, a certain kind of gentleness that’s girded by strength. Thoughtfulness, which is very difficult for a narcissist like myself to deliver on a daily basis. I’ve had to get around my own self-involvement, which is one of the natural characteristics of the artist. If I had to say something, I’d say, ‘I’m steadfast, honest, and true.’ ”

Steadfast, honest, and true. If this is his motto, it also represents the qualities his fans project onto him. These are the values Springsteen seems to embody that create such a bond with his audience. Because of this, they believe he knows them. And gives voice to their heartaches, as well as to the better selves they aspire to be. But he has also sought, especially in the second half of his career, to write songs that speak to social and class issues. He’s always revered folkies like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and around the time he released his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, he began to strive to create songs that found the intersection between “The River” and “This Land Is Your Land.” A place where, as he says, “the political and personal came together to spill clear water into the muddy river of history.”

I say to Springsteen, In your book, you write this about America: “Dread—the sense that things might not work out, that the moral high ground had been swept out from underneath us, that the dream we had of ourselves had somehow been tainted and the future would forever be uninsured—was in the air.” I tell him: What’s strange is that this is not you describing the mood of this country in 2018; this is you writing about the country in 1978, forty years earlier, at the time you wrote Darkness on the Edge of Town. Yet those words feel like they are about this country right now. Do you think America is worse or better? “I don’t think it’s better.”

You mean it’s worse? I ask.

“Well, I guess forty years-plus would make it worse. And I do feel that people feel under siege, and sometimes for reasons that I don’t agree with and that are unfortunate. Like I say, whether it’s the changing face of the nation or . . . I think those people legitimately feel under siege. Their way of life is somehow threatened—is existentially threatened. And maybe that explains Trump and maybe it doesn’t, but . . . that’s always been a part of the American story. It continues to be a part of it today. At the time when I wrote those songs, I suppose it was a lot of what I was seeing around me.”

There comes a moment in the show, before he sings “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” which was inspired by John Ford’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when he gives a beautiful reflection on how sacred he feels democracy is. He speaks of how “these are times when we’ve also seen folks marching, and in the highest offices of our land, who want to speak to our darkest angels, who want to call up the ugliest and most divisive ghosts of America’s past. And they want to destroy the idea of an America for all. That’s their intention.”

So I ask him: Who are the “they”?

“Well,” he says, “I would be talking about our president. Probably number one. [He] has no interest in uniting the country, really, and actually has an interest in doing the opposite and dividing us, which he does on an almost daily basis. So that’s simply a crime against humanity, as far as I’m concerned. It’s an awful, awful message to send out into the world if you’re in that job and in that position. It’s just an ugly, awful message. You are intentionally trying to disenfranchise a large portion of Americans. I mean, you are simply . . . that’s unforgivable. And then there’s just the rise of—whether it’s the alt-right or the folks who were marching in Charlottesville with their tiki torches and all of that coming to the fore again, you know? Which our president was more than happy to play into and to play to. So these are folks who are invested in denying the idea of a united America and an America for all. It’s a critical moment. This has come so far to the surface, and it’s so toxic. And it appears to have a grip . . . and to be so powerful . . . in a lot of people’s lives at the moment. It’s a scary moment for any conscientious American, I think.”

And if you could, I say to him, make one request of citizens in this country right now, what would it be?

A long silence follows. Springsteen turns back to the mirror and, at the same time, draws both of his booted feet up to the edge of the couch. He resembles a man squatting beside a campfire, watching flames. “I think that a lot of what’s going on has been a large group of people frightened by the changing face of the nation. There seems to be an awful lot of fear. The founding fathers were pretty good at confronting their fears and the fears of the country. And it’s the old cliché where geniuses built the system so an idiot could run it. We are completely testing that theory at this very moment. I do believe we’ll survive Trump. But I don’t know if I see a unifying figure on the horizon. That worries me. Because the partisanship and the country being split down the middle is something that’s gravely dangerous. To go back to your question, what would my wish be? [Sighs] It’s corny stuff, but: Let people view themselves as Americans first, that the basic founding principles of the country could be adhered to, whether it’s equality or social justice. Let people give each other a chance.”

"[DONALD TRUMP] HAS NO INTEREST IN UNITING THE COUNTRY, REALLY."

In the show, Springsteen plays many moments for laughs. He’s a natural actor, with a gift for landing a line or milking a moment. He’s also good at building the intensity of a story—or, if he has to, deflating it, as he does at one point when he shifts gears for an intense stretch and jokes, “I’m going to release you from suicide watch right now.” But as I prepare for our final meeting, I find myself thinking he may be hiding in plain sight. I think about his description of his second breakdown, which descended upon him a few years after he turned sixty. It was a darkness that lasted on and off for three years; it was, he writes, “an attack of what was called an ‘agitated depression.’ During this period, I was so profoundly uncomfortable in my own skin that I just wanted OUT. It feels dangerous and brings plenty of unwanted thoughts. . . . Demise and foreboding were all that awaited.”

It is the writing of a man desperate to escape profound pain. So when I see him, I ask: Have you ever attempted to take your life? “No, no, no.”

But have you ever contemplated suicide?

“I once felt bad enough to say, ‘I don’t know if I can live like this.’ It was like . . .” He pauses for a moment. Then: “I once got into some sort of box where I couldn’t figure my way out and where the feelings were so overwhelmingly uncomfortable.”

Was that during your first breakdown?

“No. This was the ‘agitated depression’ I talk about in the book, where feelings became so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that I simply couldn’t find a twelve-by-twelve piece of the floor to stand on, where I could feel a sense of peace on.” As he tells me this, he brings his hands up to either side of his face, framing it like blinders on a horse, as though trying to conjure that small square of safe space. Trying to see it. Then he says, all the while still holding his blinder hands to the sides of his head: “I had no inner peace whatsoever. And I said, ‘Gee, I really don’t know. I don’t know how long I could . . .’ It was a manic state, and it was just so profoundly emotionally and spiritually and physically uncomfortable that the only thing I’ve ever said was ‘Gee, I don’t know, man . . .’ It gave me a little insight into . . .”

Springsteen’s voice trails off and he slowly lets his hands fall into his lap. For a moment, neither one of us says anything. Then I break the silence and ask: Did you think you should be hospitalized?

“No one was saying that I should be . . .” Springsteen gives me a wry smile. “I had a couple very good doctors. But, unfortunately, it was August. That’s when they all take off.” Springsteen lets out one of his short, raspy laughs. “All I remember was feeling really badly and calling for help. I might have gotten close to that and for brief, brief periods of time. It lasted for—I don’t know. Looking back on it now, I can’t say. Was it a couple weeks? Was it a month? Was it longer? But it was a very bad spell, and it just came. . . . Once again—DNA. And it came out of the roots that I came out of, particularly on my father’s side, where I had to cop to the fact that I also had things inside me that could lead me to pretty bad places.”

Greeting fans outside the Walter Kerr Theatre. Vintage Golden Bear biker jacket, All Saints T-shirt, jeans, Frye boots, and jewelry, Sprinsteen’s own.

And when you see someone like Anthony Bourdain, can you understand how that happens?

“Well, I had a very, very close friend who committed suicide. He was like an older son to me. I mentored him. And he got very, very ill. So, ultimately, it always remains a mystery—those last moments. I always say, Well, somebody was in a bad place, and they just got caught out in the rain. Another night, another way, someone else there . . . it might not have happened.” He pauses. “They were ill, and they got caught out in the rain. . . . I don’t know anyone who’s ever explained satisfactorily the moments that lead up to someone taking that action. So can I understand how that happens? Yes. I think I felt just enough despair myself to—pain gets too great, confusion gets too great, and that’s your out. But I don’t have any great insight into it, and in truth, I’ve never met someone who has.”

Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?

“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”

I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”

“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”

I ask if he has spent his life trying to love that boy his father denied.

“Those were big moments that I had through my analysis. I saw myself as a child and experienced my own innocence and realized, Oh my God, I was so fragile. I was so easily broken and dismissed. My father taught me to hate that person. So it took me quite a while to come back around and make my peace with who I was. That was a lot of what I was doing through my playing—trying to come to a place where I could just stand myself. [Laughs] It was just developing a self that allowed me to live with myself in a way that a lot of the self-loathing didn’t allow. That’s just a part of my DNA. I do a lot better with it now, but it’s an ongoing struggle.

A close-up of one of Springsteen’s guitars.

“I was well into my forties before I figured this out. I don’t know how to describe [that breakthrough] except you think you’re seeing all of yourself, and then it’s like a finger pokes at this boundary in front of you and suddenly a little brick drops out, and you look through [the wall], and you go, Oh my God—there’s this entire other world in there that I’ve never seen. And a lot of it, you’ve sort of been living in—I don’t know how to describe it—a cruel universe, and it’s just a little ray of light that allows you to see more of your experience and existence. [Pauses] I mean, what are you doing in analysis? You’re trying to take all this misunderstanding and loathing, and you’re trying to turn it into love—which is the wonderful thing that happens when you’re trying to make music out of the rough, hard, bad things. You’re trying to turn it into love. So along with that effort came the realization, through a lot of studying and analysis, of how rough I’d been on myself and had continued to be until a very late stage in life.”

I tell him I’m thinking about his lines in “The Promised Land”—“Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode . . . take a knife and cut this pain from my heart. . .”—and how for years I thought the song was about the heartbreak of losing a woman.

“It’s about existential weakness and trying to the best of your ability to transcend it.”

And the line “the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted”?

“Everybody carries those things with them. It’s a line that always penetrates. It still penetrates for me when I sing it each night.”

I tell him: You’re making me see that “The Ties That Bind” is not a love story but about the DNA family ties you can’t escape.

“The bonds of your personal family,” he says, “but also the ties you can’t break among your community and your fellow citizens. You can’t forsake those things. It’ll rot your core at the end of the day. If you want to see someone who’s—look at Trump. He has forsaken a lot of these things, and it’s affected him. He’s deeply damaged at his core.”

Because he forsook the ties, the bonds?

“Absolutely. That’s why he’s dangerous. Anyone in that position who doesn’t deeply feel those ties that bind is a dangerous man, and it’s very pitiful.”

And then I tell him I’m thinking about “Born to Run,” which contains four words in one line that are the sum of him: sadness, love, madness, and soul. “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.”

“Those are my lines. ‘Born to Run.’ That’s my epitaph, if you wanna know my epitaph. There it is. It still is, probably—I use the song at the end of the show every night as a summary. The idea is that it can contain all that has come before. And I believe that it does.”

Sadness, love, madness, soul. I tell him: Those are your four elements.

“The last verse of my greatest song. And that’s where it ought to end every night.” Springsteen pauses. “Twenty-four when I wrote it. Wow. It’s a . . . holds up pretty well. But I . . . that was what I was aiming for in those days—that’s what I was shooting for.”

I tell Springsteen that before I leave, I have one last question. In the book, he talks about how, when he was nineteen, he and his buddies loaded up a truck with all their worldly possessions and kissed Freehold goodbye. Yet a few years later, we learn that Springsteen, while dating a woman with a young daughter, has given the girl the rocking horse he loved as a boy.

“Ah,” Springsteen says, a look of happiness rising up in his eyes, “my rocking horse.”

Right, I say. But here’s the image I can’t square—you are a nineteen-year-old badass, ditching your hometown with your buddies. Lying on the back of a flatbed truck with a guitar and a duffel bag. And you’re telling me you have your rocking horse with you?

Springsteen looks at me like I’m crazy. “Well, it was the only thing I had left from my childhood.”

He goes on to tell me that years after giving the girl the rocking horse, he tracked down her mother and asked her to return it. The woman, however, had given it away. He pauses. I ask him if he has carried anything else with him from his childhood, and he tells me how when he was growing up, there was a merry-go-round on the Asbury Park boardwalk that he rode as a kid. “It had an arm and on the end of it, there was a gold ring. If you caught it, you got a free ride. I used to go nuts because I could never reach these rings. I rode it a thousand times. But then one night before I was about to put my first record out— I can remember the night . . . I got on the merry-go-round and bing! I grabbed the gold one.”

Where is it now? I ask.

“I keep it in my writing room, at home. And the rest is history.”

i did see this and was going to post but i thought it might go a bit too close to the wind for some. glad it got up tho!

[Ken Gargett]

On 11/30/2018 at 2:51 PM, MIKA27 said:

THE LAST DROP 1982 BOURBON

Age can be good or bad, depending on the context — but when it comes to whiskey, age is almost always a desirable trait. That being said, a true whiskey aficionado knows the difference between a newly-crafted spirit and one that’s aged well — the latter of which has emerged in the form of The Last Drop’s first ever American whiskey, the 1982 Kentucky Straight Bourbon.

The whiskey itself is an 18-year bourbon that was pulled from the original barrel in Frankfort, Kentucky around the turn of the century for optimal maturity. The George T. Stagg Distillery (now Buffalo Trace) helped The Last Drop to procure an extremely limited 44-unit release, with only 25 bottles making their way to the U.S. market. If you’re a fan of deep, round, and delicious notes reminiscent of dried fruit and honey, you can grab a bottle for around $4,000. Don’t worry, these last drops come with a 50ml sample replica so you don’t have to open the original container for at least a few more years. $4K

i actually posted a week ago asking if anyone had any experience with last drop! clearly this is the thread for everything. 

i tried the 1971 whisky the other day. spectacular. it is 4,000 UK pounds. 

i think you'll find that the sampler replicas are only 10 mls. sadly. or at least the one for the 71 whisky was. 

[MIKA27]

Brand New ‘Captain Marvel’ Poster Ahead of Tomorrow’s Trailer

As we reported just a short while ago, we’re getting a new trailer tomorrow, during Monday Night Football on ESPN.

The above poster was just shared by the official Captain Marvel Twitter account, along with confirmation that we are getting the new trailer tomorrow during the game.

The duality on display in this new poster is interesting- on one side of Brie Larson‘s Captain Carol Danvers, we see what looks like a Kree spaceship, while on her other side, an Air Force fighter jet.

Perhaps this gives us a good indication of one of the possible plot points in the film?

The second-billed name on the poster is interesting as well, Samuel L. Jackson will be appearing as S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury in Captain Marvel, which will be set in the 90s.

Needless to say, we can’t wait to see Carol and her team roar into theaters on March 8th, 2019.

[MIKA27]

Just now, Ken Gargett said:

i actually posted a week ago asking if anyone had any experience with last drop! clearly this is the thread for everything. 

i tried the 1971 whisky the other day. spectacular. it is 4,000 UK pounds. 

i think you'll find that the sampler replicas are only 10 mls. sadly. or at least the one for the 71 whisky was. 

I'd love to try but $4K is a bit too steep for most.  Does it taste like it's worth that much Ken?

[Ken Gargett]

Just now, MIKA27 said:

I'd love to try but $4K is a bit too steep for most.  Does it taste like it's worth that much Ken?

needless to say, i did not pay for it. arrived as a sample.

day after, i got the full bottle of the flor de cana 25-year-old rum. so a good week! one of my fave rum producers and that is stunning. 

back to last drop, all relative of course. i would never pay that but there are plenty for whom that is peanuts. i can say it was exceptional. look forward to a forthcoming kenfessions for the full review. 

[MIKA27]

The Cologne for Men Who Don’t Like Cologne

With fragrance, you’re either in or you’re out. There are whole passels of men who consider scent part of their standard grooming routine and wouldn’t walk out the door without it. Conversely, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a contrarian who prefers to be no-fuss, no-muss—and definitely no cologne.

I’m suspicious that at least some of those in the latter camp sit there because they associate cologne with cloying, heavy, “Whoa, who just walked in the room?” power. They’re Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce-phobic. Scarred by heavy-handed experiences with Acqua di Gio in high school.

Not all cologne is like that.

Guess 1981 sits at the other end of the olfactory spectrum, with a lightness that lets it pleasingly fade into the background. It’s inspired by California, for heaven’s sake.

For starters, it won’t smack you in the face.

The top notes of violet leaves and bergamot translate to a delicate, ever so spicy scent. In other words: This could be a room spray. It’s that opposite-of-offensive, difficult-to-place smell that would make a living room feel more luxe. It’s reminiscent of that most appealing of smells: clean laundry.

No one’s going to hate it.

Some colognes are divisive. This is not one of them. With middle notes of cedarwood and gray amber, it’s familiar enough that no one will catch a whiff and be totally thrown. The woodsy, earthy, ever-so-slightly musky scent might not be everyone’s favorite, but it’s too grounded to inspire visceral reactions. Barring going overboard and bathing in a full vat of it, you’re safe.

The price tag is right for experimenting.

Fun fact: Colognes can get very, very expensive (like, topping $1k a bottle). At $65, you’re probably not going to do too much damage to your bank account. The wallet-friendly price tag alleviates the pressure that comes with bigger buys: You don’t need to wear daily to make sure you get your money’s worth. Instead, add in as needed (i.e., date nights if they’re into it, or for more dressed-up situations like evening events or professional meetings).

All said, it’s worth having a crowd-pleasing scent to wear daily or when the mood strikes.

[MIKA27]

SCIENTISTS BELIEVE THEY’VE LOCATED THE EIGHTH LOST WONDER OF THE WORLD

The Grand Canyon. The Great Barrier Reef. Mount Everest. Victoria Falls. You may not be able to remember all seven natural wonders of the world; but you could be forgiven for thinking there were only seven of them.

Well two scientists now reckon they have an eighth to add to the list: the Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand’s Lake Rotomahana, which were thought to have been destroyed in the late 1800’s by an eruption of a nearby volcano.

In a recent Frontiers Earth Science journal paper, researchers Andrew Martin Lorrey and John Mark Wooley argue that the fabled geothermal masterpiece was not destroyed in the 1886 eruption, and is preserved, Pompei-style, underneath a 10 metre coating of mud and ash.

As reported by Traveller, “A 19th century diary and hand-drawn maps have led scientists at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research to confirm the location of the country’s lost natural wonder – the Pink and White Terraces.”

As stated in Lorrey and Wooley’s report, “Notes by Ferdinand von Hochstetter (b. 1829–d. 1884) has recently supported claims that the former Pink and White Terraces survived the 1886 eruption, and that they may be located under tephra adjacent to the modern lake margin.”

The two believe that our understanding of New Zealand’s largest historic volcanic eruption is “incomplete,” and that new technology combined with the insights they have gleaned from the 19th century German-Austrian geologist’s diary could ultimately lead to the excavation of what was once known as the eighth natural wonder of the world.

Quote

“The terraces formed over thousands of years as silica-rich water emerging from springs and boiling geysers crystallised into giant tiered staircases. The White Terrace covered more than three hectares while the smaller Pink Terrace was used for bathing on the lower levels. There was also a smaller, lesser known feature called Tuhi’s Spring, or the Black Terrace,” (Traveller).

An artist’s depiction of the Terraces, pre-eruption.

Before Mt Tarawera erupted in 1886, Lake Rotomahana’s Pink and White Terraces were, “The greatest tourist attraction in the southern hemisphere and the British Empire, and shiploads of tourists made the dangerous visit down from the UK, Europe and America to see them,” Rex Bunn, another scientist, told The Guardian.

Quote

“But they were never surveyed by the government of the time, so there was no record of their latitude or longitude.”

This means greater significance than usual has been placed on Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s maps—the only resource currently available. Whilst his work has been studied in the past, disagreements have been common, and Lorrey and Wooley believe “modern geomorphic techniques” and “geophysical data” (if they get the funding to gather it) will help resolve this controversy.

In the Frontiers Earth Science Journal, they said, “We harnessed a wider amount of unique historic data than (has been used) previously to locate the sites of Lake Rotomahana’s former sinter terraces.”

According to them light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data suggests the need for a reconstruction of Hochstetter’s (1859) survey, particularly the southern margin of former Lake Rotomahana, to search for the lost wonder.

Although this isn’t the first time someone has claimed to have located the lost terraces (back in 2017 another group of scientists requested funding to prove a similar theory), Lorrey and Wooley are hoping to be the first to get (significant) funding to prove it.

Early signs indicate the scientists have the Tūhourangi Tribal Authority, for whom the (potential) discovery holds immense cultural significance, onside. And as Lorrey and Wooley point out, new technology could help their case, as virtual reality would enable a search to take place using far less invasive methods as have been considered in the past, like draining the lake.

[MIKA27]

LIND & LIME GIN

Inspired by and named for Dr. James Lind, who discovered that citrus fruits helped prevent scurvy in 1747, Lind & Lime Gin is made in the heart of Edinburgh, Scotland. The gin is the first distilled at The Port of Leith Distillery Co. and uses seven curated botanicals and a zesty, refreshing lime flavor. The spirit is presented in beautiful glass bottles whose design pays homage to French wine bottles that were traded at Leith harbor as far back as the mid to late 17th century.

 

[MIKA27]

RUNGE RS RACER

Absorbing its surrounding scenery with its mirror-like finish as it zips down the road, this ‘50s style racer is a metallic masterpiece. Former competitive snowboarder Chris Runge specializes in building vintage-styled aluminum race cars with his bare hands and his Runge RS racer might be his best work yet.

The curvy silver road surfer pulls from the design framework of the Porsche 718 RSK and Porsche Spyder, as well as Maserati and Ferrari details. It has a two-seat leather-trimmed cockpit with a steel tube frame, bolt pattern Wide 5 wheels, vintage mechanical components, a qualifier tank, and a removable canopy. Under the hood roars a newly built air-cooled flat-four cylinder engine capable of a cool 159 horsepower. At the moment, Runge is taking three orders per year, since each car takes roughly 2,000 man hours to complete. You can get a hold of Runge for pricing and see if you can get on their list for an incredible custom build.

 

[MIKA27]

Christie’s Is Auctioning Off a Collection of Pre-Prohibition Whiskey

When it comes to auction houses willing to selling the most unique pieces on the market, you won’t find better than Christie’s. They’ve done Jean-Michel Basquiat artwork. They’ve done original Darth Vader costumes. They’ve done Bond Aston Martins. Now, Christie’s is turning to something near and dear to our hearts—whiskey. Christie’s Wine & Spirits Department has compiled an enormous collection of pre-prohibition spirits that is being billed as “the most comprehensive and important collection of pre-prohibition Bourbon to ever appear at auction.” You have the chance to bid on over 40 cases of unopened, bonded whiskey, including Hermitage whiskey distilled in 1914 and Old Crow distilled in 1912. The complete collection of unique, pre-prohibition whiskey was secreted away in a Scooby Doo-style secret lair that existed behind a bookcase, leaving it untouched for almost a century. Now, you have the opportunity to add these rare gems to your own personal collection.

 

[MIKA27]

The New Captain Marvel Trailer 

The first trailer for Captain Marvel was big but we hadn’t seen anything yet. Now the second trailer is here, and the worlds of Carol Danvers have exploded onto the scene in ways that are sure to make your own head explode.

Earth, Space, Skrulls, Nick Fury — they are all here and then some in the new trailer for Captain Marvel. Check it out.

That trailer is incredible and, if you believe the rumours, there may be more to come from Marvel later this week. Yes, we mean that. And yet, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s cosmic origin story looks so good, it almost makes us forget we’re getting two Carol-starring movies next year.

Captain Marvel opens March 8.

[MIKA27]

For Sale: A Handwritten Apple I Spec Sheet By Steve Jobs

A handwritten spec sheet for the first Apple computer is currently for sale through Bonham's Auction house. It's over 40 years old and was written by old mate Steve Jobs himself.

This is some seriously cool computer history right here.

The roughly-written spec sheet describes the first Apple computer as the "real deal" and goes on to describe a machine with 8K bytes of RAM and a full CRT terminal among other tidbits.

It also quotes the price of the computer to be $US785, which is around $101. That's not bad considering that they now sell for as much as $367,000.

The sheet was apparently given to a friend of Jobs in 1976 - the same year the Apple I was released. The final product only has 4K bytes of RAM and sold for a whole lot more than what Jobs proposed here - $US666.66.

Not many units sold, and production of the Apple-1 was discontinued shortly after the release of the game-changing Apple II in 1977.

The auction lot not only contains the paper, but also two Polaroids of the Apple I machine and the Apple I monitor.

This is the full lot description:

Quote

 

“With the first 50 boards sold to the Byte Shop, Steve Jobs continued the momentum by marketing bare Apple-1 printed circuit boards (PCBs) to friends and acquaintances. The present manuscript is essentially a specification sheet for the computer and was given to the consignor during a visit to Jobs’ garage. Jobs refers to the computer as “Apple Computer-1” and states that it uses either the 6800, 6501 or 6502 microprocessor, but that the 6501 or 6502 was “recommended because we have basic.” He touts the “full crt terminal” the “58 ic’s which includes 16 for 8K ram!!” Curiously, Jobs states “basic on the way (ROM),” which never materialised for the Apple-1, but did the following year for the Apple II. Jobs quotes the price of $US75 for the board and manual, “a real deal” and lists his mailing address and phone number at the bottom.”

“The manuscript is accompanied by two Polaroid photographs. The first shows an Apple-1 on a wooden table with a keyboard, monitor and power supply partially visible in the right edge. It looks very much like the “Production Prototype,” number 2 in Mike Willegal’s Apple-1 Registry, with its orange capacitors, white ceramic MOS MCS 6502 and with a similar power supply setup. The other Polaroid shows the Apple-1 screen with “Apple Computer Co. at the bottom and Jobs’ address and phone number for contact. Jobs has written on the lower margin “40×24 OR 26 lines / fuzzy because camera wiggled.”

 

According to the the Bonham's auction house website, the lot is listed at $54,000 - $81,000. If that sounds ridiculous, it's worth noting that a job application by Steve Jobs once sold for over $236,000.

If you have the kind of capital to bid on this, firstly - can I have some? Secondly, you can do so right here.

[MIKA27]

1926 MACALLAN WHISKY SELLS FOR A WORLD RECORD US$1.5 MILLION

Put down your reconstituted pineapple juice for a second and feast your eyes on the latest world record-breaking whisky instead.

This is the 1926 Macallan and this week it fetched a staggering $2 million (US$1.5 million) as part of Christie’s auction of fine and rare spirits – the highest figure ever recorded for a publicly sold bottle.

“The sale represents a landmark moment in the whisky market,” said Tim Triptree MW, Christie’s international director of Wine.

If this headline sounds familiar then you wouldn’t be wrong. Earlier this year Bonhams in Hong Kong sold two of the same 1926 Macallan bottles featuring labels by Sir Peter Blake and Valerio Adami for US$1.2 million. Following that, another Bonhams auction in Edinburgh saw a single bottle of 1926 Macallan selling for US$1.2 million.

And now we have the latest title clincher from the coveted Scotch whisky brand at US$1.5 million. That’s three consecutive records in 2018 alone with the latter bearing a unique bottle design.

How unique?

This particular bottle was so elusive that it was last seen trading hands in 1999 at Fortnum & Mason. From that point on, even The Macallan distillery didn’t know if it still existed – until now.

This particular example is exceptionally rare thanks to its label. Of the 25 bottled back in 1986, this is the only one to feature a label decorated by hand; a true unicorn of the drinking world (not that anyone will be game enough to drink it).

[MIKA27]

PORSCHE GT VISION TRUCK

A couple of years ago designer Alexander Imnadze, who’s worked for the likes of Alfa Romeo and Ford, created the absolutely stunning Porsche GT Vision 906/917 competition vehicle concept. Now, Imnadze is back at it again, following up his gorgeous Le Mans race car with the Porsche GT Vision truck.

This isn’t just an elaborate race car transporter either, it’s a hybrid that doubles as a race truck so it can get some action on the track as well. It has a futuristic, smooth wraparound windscreen, customizable LED headlights, and rearview cameras. The muscular, heavy-duty truck also features taillights inspired by the 2020 Porsche 911, air vents, and a stylishly integrated spoiler. The design is void of any exhaust pipes, so we can assume it’s an all-electric vehicle. What we know for sure is that it’s the most striking transport truck concept we’ve ever seen.

[MIKA27]

THE STAR WARS ARCHIVES COFFEE TABLE BOOK

Star Wars is epic. And we don’t just mean the films themselves but the sheer imagination, manpower, and hard work it took to bring them to life, as well. Now, you can go behind the scenes like never before, courtesy of Tashen’s XXL coffee table book, The Star Wars Archives.

Across a gargantuan 604 full-color pages, this magnificent hardcover tome, which covers 1977–1983, contains pretty much everything you could ever want to know about George Lucas’s original trilogy of space opera sci-fi films. From Ralph McQuarrie’s legendary concept art to actual script pages, storyboards, and onset photos — every corner of the production is covered beautifully and completely. Whether you’re a hardcore Starwoid, a science-fiction fanatic, or a big-time movie buff, this $200 chronicle is practically a compulsory purchase. And may the Force be with you. $200

[MIKA27]

PAN TREETOP CABIN IN NORWAY

Norway is full of natural wonder, from raging fjords and beautiful mountaintops, all the way to the illustrious northern lights. It’s also a perfect environment for some of the most intriguing homes on the planet — like the PAN Treetop Cabin, a rental property which towers above its surroundings in a completely unique way.

The Treetop Cabin is an ambitious architectural wonder created by Espen Surnevik and Finn-Erik Nilsen. It features a truly abstract design and was created with a non-invasive layout that allows for the home to blend seamlessly with its naturally forested surroundings. The cabin is elevated by four separate stilts, reinforced by steel braided cable, and placed at a precise location within the canopy to ensure exposure to the sun, which showers the living area with natural light. The interior of the home features rotational views of the surrounding wildlife, as well as providing natural heating and cooling via large glass facades. Energy expenditure is limited due to the cabin’s sustainable components. A winding staircase housed in a glass cylinder reaches upward toward the home and connects to the main living area through a small exterior walkway.